Affordable Energy Without Environmental Harm

Robert Stavins and the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements research the best architecture for an agreement that will help prevent catastrophic climate change, a new book by Laura Diaz Anadon, Matthew Bunn, and Venkatesh (Venky) Narayanamurti takes on the challenge of transforming energy innovation in the United States—the world’s largest economy—to help provide secure, affordable energy without causing major damage to the environment and the climate.

Transforming U.S. Energy Innovation assesses the role the U.S. government should play in energy technology innovation, which is an essential tool in solving the energy/environment dilemma. The authors analyze how different technologies might interact, complementing or competing with one another. They also explore how the U.S. government can maximize the returns on its energy innovation investments.

Their research convinced the authors that an effective energy innovation approach must meet a set of specific criteria. They describe this as the CASCADES approach — Comprehensive, Adaptive, Sustainable, Cost-effective, Agile, Diversified, Equitable, Strategic.

Energy innovation proposals using the CASCADES criteria, according to the authors, will maximize the chance that U.S. government policy can create “cascades of beneficial energy innovations stretching into the future.”

More on the publication Transforming U.S. Energy Innovation can be found here.